Gaza and the Barbarism Beneath Our Civilisation

By Palestine Will Be Free – Aug 9, 2026

The world has watched Gaza in real time, revealing how easily modernity can coexist with medieval barbarism.

For all our modern sophistications, sensibilities, and gadgetry—including million-dollar watches that keep the most accurate time and vehicles that whirr the least while transporting our fat selves from 0 to 100-something kilometres an hour in a jiffy—we have allowed medieval barbarism to be visited upon our fellow beings in the Gaza Strip for nearly three years.

Not only have we allowed thousand-pound bombs to be dropped on fragile, emaciated bodies, vapourising them out of existence within seconds, but we have also allowed the suffering of the Palestinians to continue in other forms, even when the pace of those bombings has slowed.

The latest manifestation of this depravity we have allowed in broad daylight is the ongoing recovery of bodies from the millions of tonnes of rubble to which the Western-supplied bombs have reduced nearly the entirety of the Gaza Strip.

Gaza’s Civil Defence on Saturday announced the recovery of 19 bodies from the rubble of a destroyed residential building in Gaza City. In a world where multistorey buildings can now be erected in a matter of weeks with advanced machinery, it took four days for civil defence personnel to dig up the bodies that had lain buried for months. Denied access to basic excavation equipment by a medieval Israeli siege, which has deprived Palestinians of access to proper food, clean water, and essential medicines, teams in Gaza have been working with rudimentary tools and their bare hands to remove thousands of tonnes of rubble, reaching long-buried bodies and giving them dignified burials.

This latest recovery comes close on the heels of a mass funeral held in Gaza City on Tuesday, when the remains of 112 people from two families were pulled from a building that was flattened by the Israelis in November 2023.

More than 8,000 bodies are estimated to remain buried beneath the rubble. At the current pace, it could take decades to recover them.

What we have witnessed in Gaza over the past three years are two separate worlds. One in which the supposedly civilised West has bared its fangs and facilitated the supposedly civilised Jewish state in digging deep into the flesh of emaciated Palestinian babies, poisoning their wells, forcing little children to trade school bags for jerrycans nearly half their own size, destroying schools, erasing entire school years, and torturing parents with devices that would put savages of the Middle Ages to shame.

Then there is the other world. In it, the most pertinent discussion appears to centre on the leadership of a football body; supposedly civilised Europe would not allow a corrupt autocrat to sell off shares in the World Cup. That’s a red line for European leaders, one of whom was unequivocal when declaring that the Jewish state had the “right” to lay siege on the Gaza Strip and to cut off power and water to the 2.3 million Palestinians in the enclave.

In this other world, the mass annihilation of more than two million people livestreamed in 4K is not a red line.

It is as if we are living in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: a technologically sophisticated, comfortable society coexisting with suffering that is geographically and psychologically compartmentalised. But unlike Le Guin’s fictional world, where the misery inflicted upon the child takes place away from the public eye, the extermination of Gaza’s million-plus children, their parents, and their grandparents is not hidden from public view.

It is all out there.

‘Israeli’ Occupation Troops Clear 10 Million Tons of Rubble in Gaza To ‘Erase Evidence’ of Genocide

This savagery is not condemned. There is not even an attempt to conceal it. It is justified, defended, and even celebrated.

The supposedly civilised world has demonstrated that it possesses an extraordinarily refined vocabulary for describing the integrity of institutions of ultimately trivial consequence and the sanctity of commercial arrangements. Yet when it comes to the destruction of an entire people, there is nothing but handwaving, while the corpses of the wretched of the earth accumulate beneath the rubble, to be eaten away by worms before they can be recovered, if at all, with bare hands years down the line.

But let not this lived daily reality come in the way of the screening of the next match, or the front-row seats at the latest concert, where we will be rocking our newest pair of sneakers snapped up from the latest drop.

The obscenity. The sheer obscenity of the world we inhabit.

What does our civilisation say about itself when its technological sophistication has advanced immeasurably faster than its capacity—or willingness—to recognise the suffering of people outside its circle of concern?

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(Substack)